Steven Stern, Time Out New York, October 3-10, 2002, p. 58

Shaggy dogma stories
Visit Jim Shaw's two next exhibits and get converted to O-ism

Most people who know about L.A.-based artist Jim Shaw probably know him as a connoisseur of thrift store paintings. Since the 1970s, he's curated an ever-growing collection of bizarre amateur canvases, culled from junk shops across America. But this is only the tip of a deep, and deeply odd, iceberg. Shaw's collecting is just one strategy in his sustained and complicated engagement with contemporary visual culture - both vernacular and highbrow. Through several multipart, quasi-narrative projects, Shaw has played cut-and-paste with styles ranging from Minimalism to monster magazine illustration, offering a cockeyed take on where images come from and what they do.

His latest works are set in a baroquely elaborate fictional context. Shaw has invented an entire American religion - what he calls "O-ism". It includes history, dogma, rituals, the whole deal. Shaw's O-ism is a bizarro-world version of the Mormon Church: Founded by a charismatic preacher's daughter in 19th-century upstate New York, its flock migrated to the Midwest to escape persecution. Salient beliefs of the sect include the existence of an unnameable female deity, a prohibition against figurative art and the revelation that time actually runs backwards. Got that?

You don't need to brush up on theology to get a kick out of the simulated O-ist art in Shaw's exhibit at Metro Pictures. At the moment, this is the funniest bunch of paintings in New York. There's a giddy pleasure in looking at the faux-naif weird-ass imagery on display: In one canvas, two smudgy pioneers sit at the center of a wagon train, eating a bleeding human leg; another shows a tentacled breast-thing gripping a gray, featureless man.

There's more than mere kitsch or gross-out humour going on here. The back story is that these paintings were discovered in O-ist thrift stores (apparently having escaped the group's ban on figurative representation). And as you make your way through the gallery, something creepy starts to happen. You begin piecing things together. What emerges isn't a narrative, exactly, but free-floating links of a strange iconography. Images recur in painting after painting - owls, glowing keyholes, men with floppy hats - and what at first seemed like personal dementia begin to resemble something like a shared mythology.

Another face of Shaw's O-ist universe, on view at the Swiss Institute, plays imagined biography to the thrift store paintings' invented anthropology. The show consists of the re-created studio of a modernist O-ist painter. As we learn from the exhibition notes, Adam O. Goodman struggled with the spiritual and artistic demands of his religion, leading a dual life as an orthodox O-ist abstractionist, while carrying on a secret career as a commercial illustrator. Seven paintings - concentric rings of color on circular canvases - are accompanied by a seven-sided arrangement of file cabinets. The drawers are filled with decades' worth of popular imagery clipped from magazines, cataloged by type: the shameful evidence of Goodman's apostasy. (It's a sort of a bargain-basement version of Gerhard Richter's solemn picture archive, Atlas).

Shaw's project is a provocative reconceptualization of the high/low divide and a sly critique of modernist painting's quest for "purity". The files contain everything that's been excised from abstract art, all the embarrassing pop-cultural effluvia of the 20th century. Tellingly, it's more interesting to poke through the folders of dog-eared pages than to gaze reverently at the paintings. To round faux color-field canvases are too formally strange to function as parody, yet too visually inert to be taken on their own. They are the least convincing of Shaw's O-ist artifacts. In this fictional battle between abstract austerity and the messy plenitude of mundance imagery, it's clear where the artist's energy lies.

"O-ist Thrift Store Paintings" at Metro Pictures (see Chelsea) and "Jim Shaw" at the Swiss Institute (see Soho) are both on view through October 26.